Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’ve been scanning my Wakefield Market sketchbook for a fanzine-style publication and came across these fountain pen self-portraits.
I was trying to improve drawing figures and I set out several times a week in late autumn 1981 to draw on markets, in cafes and even on the bus there and back.
In some of the sketches of Barbara from that time she’s busy knitting but I’m not sure if this Aran sweater is one of hers or one my sister knitted for me.
I’m hoping that this acrylic on canvas, 5ft x 2ft painting of Wakefield Market might soon get a second showing as it was last exhibited in 1982.
I think this is my favourite corner of the painting. I can reveal that Barbara played the role of ‘old lady in striped coat’. I’d drawn a figure on location and took a Polaroid of Barbara in as near to the striped coat and dotted headscarf as I could find.
The painting is unfinished: that case should contain a random selection of 1970s/80s ladies’ shoes! I’d sketched a children’s tricycle on one of the stalls and was able to borrow a similar one from the Ebenezer Hall play group in Horbury to paint.
My ambition was to make it into a triptych, a wrap-around experience like the market itself, which was a bit of a maze in those days.
‘Cockney Mick’ Lawton had his fruit and veg stall at the entrance to the covered meat market. He spotted me drawing and liked the drawing, so I did a him a photocopy of it. In return he got one of his assistants to fill a small paper sack with every kind of fruit from the stall. He was going to send her around with another bag for a selection of veg too, but I told him it would take me a week to finish the fruit.
At that time the first row of stalls nearest the old Cathedral School were all fruit and veg. I sat on the wall in front of the school and thought I’d be able to work unseen. No such luck:
“Penny for the Guy, Mister?”
I made a deal, I’d give them a very small amount if they’d sit for me to draw them.
I’m guessing that Kelly, Banger and Mizzy are now successful entrepeneurs.
While pruning the Golden Hornet crab apple I became aware that someone was watching me. Directly overhead a buzzard was hanging in the air, about 100 feet above me.
At the top of the stepladder in the crown of the tree, I had a wood pigeon’s eye-view of our newly-built raised beds.
Stan Barstow Memorial Garden, Queen Street, Horbury, 2.30 pm, 65℉, 17℃: As soon as I sit on a bench beneath a weeping silver birch, aphids and plant bugs start trundling about on my knee and over my sketchbook page.
After recent wind, rain and the first overnight frost, next door’s maple is going down in a blaze of ochre yellow and one of the ash trees in the wood is now devoid of leaves.
This morning two blackbirds were fighting it out over the ever-diminishing supply of sumac berries. When a song thrush flies in the spray of berries it lands on instantly detaches, plummeting to the ground and, for a moment, taking the startled thrush with it.
The small male sparrowhawk is back, again swooping down by the feeders and then pausing to perch on the hedge and again failing to catch any prey.
This morning a distant chevron of geese headed down the Calder Valley but at the weekend a skein of twenty plus was heading in the opposite direction.
This weed – thale cress? – is the sole survivor from a late sowing of basil in a pot on the kitchen windowsill. When the weather starts to get cooler our basil seedlings give up the will to live.
I’ve been giving my right hand a bit of a break for more than six months now but it still hurts as I write – at the base of my right thumb – so I’m going to have to learn to live with it and get back to regular drawing.
I’ve returned to drawing on the iPad after a break of several months.
I rescued this grasshopper from the bird bath in mid-September.
If you’re standing in the queue for the Science Museum on Exhibition Road you might spot this inscription above the large and imposing archway opposite:
SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT
SCHOOLS ** MUSEUM
A.D. 1852
The date is misleading because the building – now the Henry Cole Wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum – was constructed between 1899 and 1909.
I was seven years old when I first joined the queue at the Science Museum (I can be sure of the date because I remember a poster for Kirk Douglas’s film ‘The Vikings’ – released in August 1958 – on hoardings around the Natural History Museum gardens).
At that time there was an arts and crafts-style mosaic in the frame to the right of the archway. Several muses reclined elegantly beneath an inscription indicating that this was then the ‘Royal College of Art’.
In this photograph, probably taken around 1901, my great aunt, Eliza Elland Bell, by now Eliza Mitchell, is in her mid-thirties.
Born at Blaco Hill Farm Cottages in 1867, by the time she was 13 Eliza had started work as a domestic servant for the Johnsons at a Elm House Farm, Lound.
Ten years later and still working as a domestic servant she’d moved to Miss Hurt’s in Sutton-cum-Lound, and it was there that she met her future husband, the butler, William Henry Mitchell.
I’m colouring these images in Affinity Photo and Adobe Photoshop. Would a light sky blue be a likely colour for her outfit? I asked my friend Hilary Stubbs, my go-to costume expert:
‘I think that this colour is perfectly possible,’ she tells me, ‘though pale green or lilac would work too. Not pink as it would be considered a”young” colour I do like this colour though and it looks right.
‘The overall look of the garment should look like a dress though in reality it was probably have been a two piece to help with fit and laundering.The skirt often hook and eyed on the waist to prevent gapping.’
This wedding photograph (see link below) was taken just a year or two earlier in 1899 to me has a more Victorian look to it. The 1901 (if that’s when it was taken) with its layers and small jacket looks more Edwardian.
Swiss chard at Harlow Carr, drawn with my non-dominant left hand.